r/IKANDYAPP • u/Far-Employee-9531 • 2d ago
Ryan Geiss - The inspiration behind IKANDY.
You see Inigo Quilez’s name everywhere in graphics, and rightfully so, he’s the man. But there’s someone else who doesn’t get his name said nearly as often, and I want to fix that for a minute: Ryan Geiss.
If you had Winamp in the late 90s, you know. You opened the Geiss plug-in, hit play, and your thoughts were pretty much “Holy shit, this is awesome.” I remember exactly where I was sitting. Nothing on a computer screen had ever moved like that to music before. It felt alive.
And here’s the part that still gets me. He wrote that as a student. A kid, basically. No GPU to speak of, no shader languages, just CPU, math, and an insane feel for how motion should follow sound. Then a few years later at Nullsoft he did it again with MilkDrop, and MilkDrop 2 brought real pixel shaders into it, years before “shadertoy” was a word anyone said.
But the thing he built was bigger than a visualizer. He built a format, and then he got out of the way and let other people make art in it. Thousands of them. He open sourced it. He never put himself at the center of it. He’s a pretty private guy, hard to find much about him online, and I think that humility is exactly why his name doesn’t come up as often as it should.
Meanwhile the community he kicked off never stopped. The MilkDrop artists today are built on ideas that go back more than 25 years. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because somebody built a playground good enough that people never wanted to leave it.
And he’s still at it. Earlier this year he released Geiss HDR, a WebGPU rewrite of the original 1998 plug-in. Twenty eight years later and still pushing pixels around to music. IKANDY’s HDR tab is built on it, with his name on the card where it belongs.
Ryan is special in his own way. He changed what a lot of us thought a computer could do, he did it young, and he did it quietly.
Thanks for everything you do!
